Zwelinzima Vavi's message of solidarity to the Youth League in Bloemfontein 04-04-08

 

COSATU message of solidarity to the ANC Youth League 23rd National Conference, 3 April 2008, Bloemfontein

Delivered by General Secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi

On behalf of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, its 1.9 million members and national and provincial leadership, I bring revolutionary greetings to the ANC Youth League, and best wishes for a successful 23rd National Conference.

We salute the outgoing leadership for their bold, revolutionary style of confronting problems. Comrade Fikile Mbalula has lived up to the finest historical traditions of the Youth League, and the high standards set by such former leaders as Anton Lembede, Oliver Tambo, Jackie Selebi, Peter Mokaba, Malusi Gigaba, to name but a few. We wish him and his comrades well as they take on new challenges in the ANC and the liberation struggle.

The Youth League has a proud history of struggle for national liberation, democracy and progressive policies. From the days of the leadership of Comrades Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, right up to last year's ANC Conference, you have been in the vanguard of the movement.

You meet at an important period. The historic ANC Conference in Polokwane adopted new policies and elected a new leadership which reflect the demands and needs of the workers and the poor, and, just as important, brought the movement back to its traditional values of self-sacrifice and serving the people.

The delegates at Polokwane, who came overwhelmingly from our poorest communities, threw out with contempt the new, alien ideology of "I didn't join the struggle to be poor", which promotes self-enrichment and the creation of a new elite. And they rejected policies which promoted these same rotten values in society and led to the first decade of democracy doing more to benefit big business and the wealthy elite than the workers and the poor majority of South Africans.

Post-Polokwane, the fight against unemployment, poverty and inequality is firmly at the top of the agenda of both the ANC and the nation. We will be working together in our strengthened alliance to make sure that these progressive policies are included in the election manifesto for 2009 and implemented by the incoming ANC government.

Such policies are more necessary than ever today. Poor families have been battered by a wave of increases in the prices of basic items - bread, mealie meal, milk, transport and school fees. In the case of bread and milk, this has been made even worse by criminal price-fixing, as greedy companies conspire to make even bigger profits for themselves at the expense of their consumers.

COSATU welcomes the strong action being taken by the Competition Commission to stamp out this illegal practice but agree with the government that it needs stronger powers to extend the scope of its investigations and punish the offenders individually, rather than allowing the fines to be passed on to the consumers in even higher prices.

Now we face massive rises in the cost of electricity and petrol which will have a knock-on effect on the price of virtually everything else. The twin crises in electricity and oil supplies will also inevitably put jobs at risk and drastically slow down the rate at which new jobs can be created.

While COSATU has pledged to co-operate fully with the government's campaign to save electricity and develop new sources of generation, we will not allow the workers to pay the price for a crisis which is none of their own making. We have applied for a Section 77 Notice to allow us to protest against any threat to jobs.

Unemployment is already far too high, still around 38% of you include those who have given up even looking for work, and still affect the young disproportionately. More than 73% of those unemployed are under the age of 35. Even before the electricity crisis, not enough new jobs were being created to meet the Growth and Development Summit resolution to halve the 2004 levels of unemployment and poverty by 2014.

Current policies have spectacularly failed to break the backbone of unemployment and poverty. There is a clear need for the government to adopt the kind of strong, interventionist policies that the ANC adopted in Polokwane to ensure that the second decade of democracy belongs to workers and the poor.

In addition, as the ANC conference spelt out, we have to reverse the declining quality of jobs, as precarious and vulnerable forms of employment, especially in sectors such as construction and retail, are rapidly replacing permanent secure employment, leading to a growing army of the working poor.

Despite the welcome increases in social grants, around 20 million people are still mired in poverty. Workers' wages remain extremely low and most have fallen in real terms, as the rapidly rising prices of essential foods cancel out wage increases negotiated last year.

Our country is getting richer but more unequal, with many of the working
poor, unemployed and poverty stricken communities not reaping any benefit of economic growth and likely to fall even deeper into poverty as growth falters in the wake of the electricity crisis. Meanwhile the rich have got even richer, and helped themselves to massive salaries and bonuses.

One symptom of this inequality is the persistence of racism in our workplaces and communities. Almost every day reports come in from COSATU affiliates and provinces of employers who abuse their workers in a blatantly racist fashion, like the farmers who recently have refused to let families bury their dead, have grown cabbages over workers' graves and even forced a family to remove and rebury their child's remains.

While we are all theoretically equal, the reality is that there is a pyramid. At the top are the minority of super-rich and powerful white males, while thousands of poor blacks are at the bottom of the pile. The arrogant feeling of
superiority among the former, contrasts with the legitimate sense of anger
among the latter.

If we are to finally eradicate racism from our society the starting point
must surely be to eradicate the economic system which is so unequal and
racially skewed that it perpetuates the very power relations which spawned
apartheid and racism in the first place.

We still need to fight for a fundamental transformation of the economy and a massive redistribution of wealth and power in favour of workers and the poor. The ANC has committed itself to such policies and they should form the basis of the 2009 election manifesto.

COSATU will once again mobilise its members to campaign alongside your members to ensure an even bigger election victory for the ANC under its new leadership. The organised workers are the leading detachment of the working class, who must lead the rest of the working class in this struggle, and COSATU is doing just that. We need to campaign and mobilise in 2009 for decent work and an end to poverty and fight to ensure that shared growth becomes a reality.

The Youth League must and, I am sure will, continue to be in the vanguard of this struggle. I am confident that the new leadership which you are to elect this week will live up to the very high standards your predecessors have bequeathed to you and continue to speak out for the workers and the poor and advance the national democratic revolution.

Thanks to Fikile Mbalula and the rest of the ANCYL, we stopped the Zanufication of the ANC that reduced all other leaders and members into a mere fan club of yes men and yes women. Your challenge is to bury the organisational and political decay and regain the best of the traditions of the congress movement that the ANCYL has so gallantly fought to defend for so many years.

COSATU wishes you well. Have a good conference and elect a leadership which will continue the great work done by the comrades they are replacing.

Patrick Craven (National Spokesperson)

Congress of South African Trade Unions

1-5 Leyds Cnr Biccard Streets

Braamfontein, 2017

P.O. Box 1019

Johannesburg, 2000

SOUTH AFRICA

Tel: +27 11 339-4911/24

Fax: +27 11 339-5080/6940/ 086 603 9667

Cell: 0828217456

E-Mail: patrick@cosatu.org.za